It has been a long time since two teams induced as many sofa spasms as the New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers did, with those three false endings in the last two minutes. You thought, finally, the NFL is all about the game again. But just then, the skin-crawly headline came across the bottom of the screen, turning attention away from Tom Brady and Ben Roethlisberger to an old pot-belly named Jerry Richardson.

The NFL is in danger of stirring more antipathies than sympathies. Club owners have surveyed a variety of speculative causes for a slow corrosion in ratings and public goodwill, including anthem protests and other off-the-field headlines that have dominated the news. But at this point, owners must admit that they have driven a lot of the antipathy themselves, with their suicidally retro, cigar-waving conduct. Those revenue-scarfing, soft-seated luxury box dwellers can’t seem to get out of the way of their own product.

Monday morning’s conversation should have centered around the justice or injustice of the Patriots’ 27-24 victory, whether it truly belonged to them, or the Steelers. There was Roethlisberger, standing like a crumbling pillar after he found Jesse James for what seemed like the game-winning touchdown, only to be reversed by a camera angle and a technicality.

“What a roller coaster huh?” Roethlisberger said afterward. “To have that play and feel like you scored, and be excited for it, and have to come back and it’s not a touchdown. Game of emotions.”

Yet the viewer’s head swiveled back and forth between the Patriots-Steelers epic in the icing rain, and the alleged fetishes and racial attitudes of Carolina Panthers owner Richardson in his owner suite. On Friday, the Panthers announced that Richardson was being investigated for workplace abuses, and by Sunday morning, the story had exploded when Sports Illustrated published a host of sordid specific accusations ranging from sexual harassment to using a racial slur against an employee. These included Richardson supposedly asking to shave the legs of female employees, and demanding to examine their backsides in their jeans.

On the field, the Patriots trailed with 2:05 to go, when here came that lank, cool-hand Brady, driving them 77 yards in an astonishing 77 seconds, with four javelin passes to Rob Gronkowski. The Steelers clutched vainly at Gronkowski’s jersey until it rode up around his midsection, but couldn’t stop him. But then it was Brady’s turn to be immobilized by disbelief when Roethlisberger and the Steelers answered by driving 79 yards in just two plays.

“It was just one of those days where you go back and forth, you play right to the end and the ball bounces some weird ways,” Brady said.

While Brady sat helpless on the bench trying to control his jaw muscles, Roethlisberger delivered what appeared to be the sword to the gut with his 10-yard pass to James with 34 seconds left. But as the tight end fell to one knee and stretched his torso forward and thrust the ball across the goal, he momentarily lost his firm grip and it glanced on the turf. Suggestion: If the owners want to win back fan trust and affection, clarify what constitutes a catch and get rid of this “surviving the ground” nonsense, which sounds like a guerilla platoon order, not a game rule.

But that wasn’t the end of the NFL day. Not thirty minutes after the final play in Pittsburgh, with fans still filing out of the stadium, came the seismic announcement that Richardson will be selling the Panthers, the franchise he has owned since it was founded in 1993. No explanation was offered, or needed. You have to assume that the disclosures were going to get uglier.

Richardson is a perfect example of the extent to which the sheer girths of owners’ egos are eclipsing what should be the NFL’s true narrative: The game. Their incessant internecine rivalries and power struggles have become a chronic story line. It was Richardson who set the poisonous current tone of management-player relations, when he declared during the 2011 collective bargaining that the owners had “a [expletive] deal and we’re going to take back our league and [expletive] do something about it.” It was Richardson who, inexplicably grown arrogant on his Hardees franchise money, sat across a table and barked at Peyton Manning, “Do I need to help you read a revenue chart, son? Because I don’t know if you know how to read that.”

It was Richardson who made it clear he didn’t want his players showing any interest in Colin Kaepernick‘s anthem-social-justice movement, saying, “Politicizing the game is damaging and takes the focus off the greatness of the game itself and those who play it.” When actually, what took the focus off the game was the blackballing of Kaepernick in the first place; a simple training camp tryout could’ve avoided the whole mess.

Somewhere along the line, Richardson turned the old Tex Schramm NFL management adage, “We’re the ranchers; you’re the cattle” into something even uglier. It became, “We’re not just the ranchers; we’re the entire rodeo, and you’re what we scrape off our boots.”

Richardson, no doubt, is also capable of individual kindness, and other owners will profess sorrow over his decision to sell, and wax nostalgic over the fact that he once caught passes from Johnny Unitas with the 1959-60 Baltimore Colts. Richardson is a self-made man, the first player since George Halas to acquire an ownership stake. But Richardson, sadly, has acted as a toxic hardliner devoted to ensuring that no other player would ever be treated like a partner or equal.

Like it or not, players remain the essence of the NFL. It will be a sincere relief when this generation of owners gives way, and players become the headliners and heart of the game again, instead of querulous old men with their gorged bellies.

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